Research shows that increasing your muscle strength is the single most important thing you can do for your physical and mental health. This book shows you how–in just 30 minutes a day, once or twice a week–using the science-backed MSTF method.

The mixed messages we’ve received about exercise, aerobics, and mental and physical fitness are all misleading…or at least incomplete.
 
Clinical research shows that we lose muscle mass as we age, and that preventing muscle loss through strength training–more than cardio, stretching, or flexibility–is the key to staying active, healthy, and well. 
 
Deep Fitness introduces a proven, new approach to building strength and whole-body health: Mindful Strength Training to Failure (MSTF). This science-based method reverses muscle loss and improves overall strength in just one or two 30-minute sessions a week.
 
MSTF exercises are simple and effective, and can be done at home with resistance bands and bodyweight, or with the machines at your local gym. Using slow reps, MSTF marries mindful body awareness with proven strength-training techniques to help you become stronger at any age.
 
With more than 30 full-color exercises, Deep Fitness explains the science behind MSTF. It shows how the program boosts longevity and healthspan; aids weight loss and fat reduction; increases overall wellness and mental health; and can improve or reverse symptoms of:
  •  Prediabetes and diabetes
  •  Cardiovascular disease
  •  Metabolic syndrome
  •  Alzheimer’s and dementia
  •  Chronic inflammation
  •  Osteoporosis
  •  Other chronic illnesses

Appropriate for people of all ages and activity levels, the exercises and techniques in Deep Fitness are effective, straightforward, and sustainable, helping you enjoy the vibrant, fit, whole-body health you deserve.

New Self, New World challenges the primary story of what it means to be human, the random and materialistic lifestyle that author Philip Shepherd calls our “shattered reality.” This reality encourages us to live in our heads, self-absorbed in our own anxieties. Drawing on diverse sources and inspiration, New Self, New World reveals that our state of head-consciousness falsely teaches us to see the body as something we possess and to try to take care of it without ever really learning how to inhabit it. Shepherd articulates his vision of a world in which each of us enjoys a direct, unmediated experience of being alive. He petitions against the futile pursuit of the “known self” and instead reveals the simple grace of just being present.

In compelling prose, Shepherd asks us to surrender to the reality of “what is” that enables us to reunite with our own being. Each chapter is accompanied by exercises meant to bring Shepherd’s vision into daily life, what the author calls a practice that “facilitates the voluntary sabotage of long-standing patterns.” New Self, New World is at once a philosophical primer, a spiritual handbook, and a roaming inquiry into human history.

There are qualities we all yearn to experience in our lives–peace, simplicity, grace, connection, clarity. Yet these qualities evade us because each of them arises from an experience of wholeness, and we live in a culture that enforces divisions within each of us. In Radical Wholeness, Philip Shepherd shows the countless ways in which we are persuaded to separate from the body and live in the head. Disconnected from the body’s intelligence, we also disconnect from the wholeness of the present. This schism within us is the primary source of stress not just in our personal lives, but for the systems of the planet.

Drawing from neuroscience, anthropology, physics, the arts, myth, personal stories, and his experiences helping people around the world to experience wholeness, Philip Shepherd illuminates what true wholeness means and offers practices designed to help listeners soften into the intelligence of the body. Radical Wholeness is a call to action: to recover wholeness and experience a new way of being.